jonnybryce said:
If you're in a slow game, you can find another that runs silky smoothe that instant. When the developer decides to pull the plug, you can still play. Theres 100000000x less downtime for maintence on P2P, and most important for me, you can do something about it if the game is running like shit instead of hoping the direct server gets taken care of by Capcom.
First point: 99% of the lag comes from the players line.
Second point: you're screwed either way, server or not. Matchmaking, authentication of legal copies and stats tracking are server based even if the system is P2P, so if servers are offline, you are too.
Third point: Yeah, like Live (p2p based) doesn't have downtime.
Fourth point: *facepalm* yeah, you can debug the network code in the game if there's no server involved.
So lol.
Simply, the main reason between why server based online is fairly superior to p2p based online is server and network load.
A: One machine has to act as a host. Added processing load, network overhead, etc etc. You won't see something bigger than eight players using a p2p system, since the game would began to lag. Also related so second point. If there's dedicated servers, you have a machine that can take fairly heavier games. All games capable of 16 or more players at once use dedicated servers.
B: Network load on one machine. Since all the players have to connect to a single host, this host better have a good internet connection. If the connection is not good, online matches get nearly unplayable. Servers always have a far better internet connection that a home user would have, so again, better possibilities of having a good match.
Plus with server based online some dirty cheater tricks can't be used, like lag switching.